“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
I recently spent some time with someone who is looking for God. This is not someone who is new to spirituality but someone who has built her adult life around God. She is struggling with deep questions of faith. She is trying to make sense of how God works but things are not adding up. Considering that God is a God of mystery is not a comfort to her and hits up against her rational, intellectual approach to spirituality. She wants Him to be predictable and safe.
It was painful to hear her recount her story and where she is in this journey right now. On one hand, she talks of God as if He is a detached being who is not intricately involved in her life. But, she also expresses a deep desire to know God in an intimate way. She is filled with questions and they weigh heavy on her heart.
I left the time with her, burdened. It is nothing I can ‘fix’ or solve or answer for her…nor do I want to (several years ago, I would have felt compelled to help her see what I believe to be is true). I will simply hold her in prayer and trust that God will work in her life as He will. And know that the pain she is going through now can be used to strengthen her faith. I trust God is big enough to handle her questions and that He will allow himself to be found as she searches.
Do you have questions? Questions that you feel you can’t share because others might see that you are struggling with the mysteries of God? God can hold your questions. He can hold your doubts. He can hold all of it.
Live the questions now and perhaps, then, someday, you will, gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Grace and Peace,
Deb
2 comments:
It was a painful lesson to learn both personally and walking alongside of someone else that we can not be fixed. That there comes a time when we learn to accept and be comfortable with the mystery of God. When we let go of the if..., then... faith that so many of us were raised with how much freedom we find that God is always with us. That pain is a fact of life in a world living in the shadow of the fall. Yet God can redeem even what we view as unforgivable. Kim
Kim,
Thanks for your comment. I agree with you. Pain is part of this life and the doubts that sometimes creep in, are part of that brokenness. If we were still in the Garden there would be no need for faith.
Thank goodness we have a God that can carry us through even those times when we have doubt that He even exists.
Grace,
Deb
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